I’m pretty new to Epicor and have already learned and implemented a ton from reading through posts on this forum. Today is the first time I haven’t been able to find an existing relevant topic, so I’m hoping this will not only help me, but others as well.
In Customer Entry, I’ve been asked to make the State and Country fields mandatory, which is no big deal. I was also presented with a “dirty data” problem because our State field is open text. We have VERY inconsistent formats, not to mention typos.
The reason the State field hasn’t been made a dropdown to this point is that we do business internationally, and it was determined the list would be way too long if we included all the states and provinces from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Mexico, etc.
Long story short; has anyone modified E10 to make users select a Country first, which populates a State / Province field with only selections relevant to that country? If this is possible, I’d want to push this functionality to all places where addresses are input.
Thank you in advance for any and all guidance you can provide!
I’ve been asked about this a couple of times over the years. For the US, Canada and Mexico it’s not that much of a stretch and can be done with the User Codes functionality… IF (and that is a pretty big IF) you can prevent the powers-that-be from creeping onwards to “how about towns and cities and zip codes?”
Outside of those three countries, it becomes a maintenance nightmare. States (or provinces, or whatever the local equivalent term is) don’t change very often, but they DO change, so a static list will eventually have errors. To get over that hump, you COULD link to an online database (but now the programming gets more complicated, and perhaps such access has a cost).
I think we’ll try the child-to-the-country-table idea, as we ship to many countries. I’ll report back on the experience in June, when this request makes it to the top of my pile.
